Endurance runners in the unending great race
bifurcate the city charged with emblems the judge
suggested which we’ve embellished.

We’ve been on one side or the other
of windows positioned like mirrors
outside the projection of which initiates
the sensitive-infinite stock market ticker
controlling the scope of instinct,
the breadth of choice.

We’ve been on one side or the other
of insatiable verdict.

Loving, or loved by,
a prodigal effigy.

Someone says, discreetly, our dissent
is officially sanctioned. That woman,
he says, with her seeds –
she –
she borrows without interest
from arterial brightness.

She gives of the sensitive
network and ducks us all.

Now he’s been pushed to a rostrum where
everyone knows he’s covered at each instant
by phonecams from thirteen directions.

The man seems unprepared to go viral.
But in all this time, no one has clarified:
Is it rupture the gunneries signify?
Or silence?

Whatever.

The data suffocates
its connotations.

With others who must feel the same way,
I slip the x/y axis and enter
dream-shifting columns of athletes
proceeding steadily toward
a desired outcome I can’t envision
though the future
washes through me
like an acid my body produced.

***

Andy Stallings lives in Massachusetts with his wife, Melissa Dickey, and their children, Esme, Curran, and Galen. He teaches at Deerfield Academy. Rescue Press published his first book of poems, To the Heart of the World, in 2014.

Omni-arriving clamor of night lushtide batter heel brisk blood blitzed

perilous beauty ensconced in immutable hierarchies

flexing ingrown foodchains

radio blasts variety papers borne out

to the fenced edge of civility the

data line the barbed border

where inquisition drinks deep drinks

deep in canyons of the gunneries among

incredible inputs of music timetables wind blasts

construction shells hemorrhaging advertisement

throughout orders of the sold.

Song of

one nation clotting

against the jumbotron

triumphal gash phantom fiber-optic

stanched, gently sent to hell,

as gently fuzzed with blossoming static,

vertiginous folds of a network rigged

for revolt.

Endless varietals pop-up seeming always

to have stood there awhile in

formation bristling with defensible

sorties and gear, liquid swarms

courting official costume in sumptuous parks

and federal fertility gardens downtown,

who regulate the parasite rate

of perennial death forever.

Banners, meaningless banners,

adorn the gunneries.

Dearest vigilantes,

assimilated dissidents,

come!

Brackish assuagements pool

in the ancestral crock.

Come!

Broadband the non-prioritized panels

where none adore but all are injected with

irredactible dada

dipped from wellsprings of bot-on-bot

sex vids girdling the gunneries,

come!

Source coronas of dissidence yet to

in which freestanding children

and children of children

somehow alkalize somehow geyser

and overwhelm the sinceritas

that foretells their deaths

in a volley of unexceptional weapons

come.

***

and so this is how it goes

Josh May currently lives in the State of New Hampshire and works in the State of Vermont.  He is the author of Faust Part Four, from which Reification is pulled.

Manskin of baskets and toads
The query of your heart
Is not right
Or, is in the not-right place
judging from our spurious land pride
space in the asgard of symmetry…
you bowl your own unbumpered lane
right into our coffee table
why’d you do that?

Man of motionless cowlicks
There’s a crowd in your plexus
And this irritates your heart
Your little doggy too…

Though, wait
We love you in scrabbletown
Where the lawnmower snores
Crabs crunch on the shores
Flakes of paint, well, they flake and are to be avoided
Oh this carnival of youth and timidity –
Belongs not to the boardwalks but to culvert life
We belong to you, too, and hold gently to tiny fires
Mushy trailways and romanticized squiggly things
They’re ok, too,
Just doing their best to be forgotten

***

Rachel Daley is the author of a poetry collection, Plasmos. Her poems have most lately appeared in the Harvard Review Online and here! She currently lives and works in New Hampshire.